Political philosophy has become an increasingly active area of research over the past four decades. In response to the growing interest in the field, this new edition of A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy has been extended significantly to include fifty–five chapters across two volumes written by some of today’s most distinguished scholars.Straddling analytic and continental philosophy, the first part of the Companion considers the contributions of economics, history, law, political science, international relations and sociology to normative political thought. The collection then provides analyses of eight live political ideologies, including new chapters on Cosmopolitanism and Fundamentalism, and detailed discussions of key concepts, with much expanded coverage of international politics and global justice. New contributors include some of today’s most distinguished scholars, among them Thomas Pogge, Charles Beitz, and Michael Doyle.

From the Preface to the Second Edition (2007)

The second edition of the Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, prepared over a dozen years after the ﬁrst, has been thoroughly revamped in order to take account of recent developments in the subject. Most of the entries from the ﬁrst edition have been rewritten by the original hands, with a few being supplemented by other authors where the original was no longer available; a few have been penned afresh by new hands; and a range of extra entries have been added. Where there were just over forty chapters in the original work, there are nearly sixty in this.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

This is the first comprehensive account of Kant's cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant's views with those of his German contemporaries and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant's philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent a radical transformation in the mid 1790s and that the resulting theory is philosophically stronger than is usually thought. Using the work of figures such as Fichte, Cloots, Forster, Hegewisch, Wieland and Novalis, Kleingeld analyses Kant's arguments regarding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, the importance of states, the ideal of an international federation, cultural pluralism, race, global economic justice and the psychological feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal. In doing so, she reveals a broad spectrum of positions in cosmopolitan theory that are relevant to current discussions of cosmopolitanism.

Introduction1. World citizens in their own country: Wieland and Kant on moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism2. Universal republic of world citizens or international federation?: Cloots and Kant on global peace3. Global hospitality: Kant's concept of cosmopolitan right4. Hierarchy or diversity?: Forster and Kant on race, culture, and cosmopolitanism5. International trade and justice: Hegewisch and Kant on cosmopolitanism and globalization6. Cosmopolitanism and feeling: Novalis and Kant on the development of a universal human community7. Kant's cosmopolitanism and current philosophical debates.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

At his website at Stanford University, Professor Allen Wood has posted four papers:

1. Kant on Practical Reason(Forthcoming in "Kant and Practical Justification", Oxford University Press).Here I attempt to explicate the account of practical reason presented by Kant in the Groundwork, and to relate it critically to some contemporary conceptions of practical reason.

2. Kant and Agent-Oriented Ethics(Published in "Perfecting Virtue", Cambridge University Press, 2011).A critical discussion of virtue ethics and the relation of Kant's moral philosophy to it.

3. Hegel's Political Philosophy(Published in "A Companion to Hegel", Routledge 2011).A succinct account of Hegel's theory of the modern state, together with background information about its history and political context.

"The opening panel will bring together various perspectives on current situations of upheaval: The global consequences of the financial crisis have already long been raising questions as to our conception of democracy and the extent to which society’s normative orders are of our own making. How can we describe the current transformations? What future will emerge from the present upheavals? And how can they be influenced politically, if at all?

Excerpt:"Taylor (....) shows how there are tensions internal to our modern conception of political legitimacy that make contestation of any given political identity inevitable. Since legitimate authority is an expression of "we, the people", there is an inherent pressure to democratic inclusion. However, various functional requirements threaten to make this inclusion a homogenizing process in a way that threatens particular identifications. Unable to accommodate hierarchies of different groups, owing to its constitutive egalitarianism of status, the modern democratic state works essentially by a forced inclusion. This leads, at its limit, to ethnic cleansing in cases where, as Michael Mann puts it, "demos" is identified with "ethnos". Drawing on the work of Anderson, Calhoun, Gellner and Liah Greenfeld, Taylor argues convincingly that no explanation of nationalism can be wholly state focused: a deeper account needs to examine the underlying changes in our collective social imaginaries that make it possible for a society to conceive of itself as a society of equals, acting freely in secular time, where each citizen stands in a direct and unmediated relationship to the state. If the modern conception of political legitimacy requires collective deliberation on the part of all, then any denial of expression to a minority group is bound to generate a nationalistic counter-pressure."

See my previous post on Charles Taylor's book here (with links to some of his essays).

Alan Thomas is Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. He is the author of "Thomas Nagel" (Acumen Press, 2009).

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Excerpts:... one is naturally surprised to read Hayek saying that the differences between himself and John Rawls are "more verbal than substantial", and that Rawls and Hayek agree on "the essential point," which is that principles of justice apply to the rules of institutions and social practices, but not to distributions of particular things across specific persons. [....] Hayek claimed that people had misread Rawls, ignoring his point that if a distribution results from just institutions it is just no matter what it is. Yet it clearly seems that for Rawls, justice in institutions was itself defined at least partly in distributive terms. If one thinks of the familiar contrast between old, or classical liberalism and new, or social justice liberalism, Rawls is clearly a social justice liberal. So how could Hayek have claimed to be in agreement with Rawls? This is the historical and interpretive puzzle I want to address in my lecture tonight.

[....] at the level of normative principle, Hayek is in many ways a Rawlsian. I will outline four main areas of convergence: the importance of 'pure procedural justice', the irrelevance of merit, the use of a veil of ignorance, and the principle the inequalities should benefit everyone."

Andrew Lister is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Studies, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. See his blog here.